Memory devices have a wide variety of uses in modern electronic devices, including devices such as cellular phones, personal computers, laptops, personal digital assistants, camcorders, voice recorders, personal media players, global positioning system units, portable storage drives for such devices, and the like. As memory devices become smaller, less expensive to manufacture, and capable of storing larger amounts of information, they become viable products for larger segments of the current electronic technology. Consequently, as consumer demand and available markets for electronic memory increases, additional memory device technologies are developed to fully leverage capabilities of electronic devices in such markets. Flash memory, for example, is one type of electronic memory media that can store, erase and restore data. Furthermore, flash memory, unlike some types of electronic memory, can retain stored data without exposure to continuous electrical power, and is therefore termed “non-volatile memory”. Flash memory has become a popular device for consumer electronics, due in part to a combination of the high density and low cost of erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM) and electrical erasability introduced with electronically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM). Consequently, such memory has become a useful and popular mechanism for storing, transporting, sharing and maintaining data.
To further evolve technical capabilities associated with flash memory devices, new technical designs typically attempt to maximize flash memory efficiency. As one example, digital information stored on such devices can decay over time. Particularly, such devices are typically associated with a parameter called data retention, that provides an indication of how long data will be stored once written to a flash memory device. Typical storage life of data in flash memory can be from several years up to 10 years, for example. Some applications, however, can be very sensitive to storage life. As one example, consumers often desire pictures of family and friends to last years, decades, or even longer. Digital representations of those pictures can be subject to data retention decay as discussed above, however. Accordingly, a strong selling point for digital storage devices, like flash memory or similar technology, is data retention length.